How brightly gleams the check-engine light.

“Open up your ears and hearts:
You put a big bird in a small cage and he’ll sing you a song.”

-Patrick Watson

I had some car troubles turn mind-troubles in Pittsburgh over the weekend.

The Jeep’s fuel injector has gone wonky and it started shivering and yawing in traffic on Sunday, idling with great frustration at red lights.

For those hassles, it’s absolutely fine when you’re cruising down the highway at 70 miles-per-hour. Things only get dicey when you have to take it slow.

It makes me wonder if maybe I couldn’t use a new fuel injector. I’m also pretty discontent to idle. Racing at furious speeds in a thousand directions delights me, but being stuck in the moment has me all stalled out.

READ ON…

I’ve been afflicted with impatience and an inability to sit still since about the time I started kindergarten.  I’m a chronic fidgeter, a night-wanderer, a planter of strange magic beans. This disposition has gotten me into to my share of jams, but has also set me on some pretty amazing adventures.

I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t going full-throttle, packing my possessions for the next big move. Right now, it’s the waiting game: phone interviews and tucked-in shirts and resume attachments.

The dainty job courtship hasn’t changed the fact that I’m the usual bundle of frenetic nerves, bouncing between Washington, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I’ve tried to fill the downtime by hitting the gym, crocheting hats and doing culinary experiments on my parents. I’ve read nearly everything in the house, including several issues of Reader’s Digest.

I’m pretty good at finding ways to stay occupied, however short my attention span may be. But I’m also the girl who stays up all night reading because she can’t stand not knowing what comes next. It’s why I had to quit watching The Wire for the last few months of grad school. I’m dying to find out what the next episode might bring.

Here’s the thing– the future needn’t be certain. In fact, it’s better that way because I find that excitement almost always trumps predictability. What I want is some momentum, the illusion of forward motion if not the actuality. But who knows, maybe something fruitful will come of all this pacing the house and blogging philosophic. After all, as Mr. Watson says:

Mrs. Henry and me

“Please, Missus Henry,
Missus Henry, please!
I’m down on my knees
An’ I ain’t got a dime.”

-Bob Dylan

This is one of our top two favorite songs about Henrys here at Hankincents.

It shares the distinction, of course, with “Henry The Eighth, I Am” by Herman’s Hermits.

This particular Henryesque tune is a delightfully slurred plea to a Mrs. Henry, who seems to be the barkeep or a landlady, to come scrape a drunken soul off the floor.

It’s certainly not the best song on The Basement Tapes. But I can’t help loving it, especially because I’ve got my own benevolent Mrs. Henry innkeeper landlady bartender (mom) doin’ right by me, while I ain’t got a dime.

“Oh, get a job? Just get a job? Why don’t I strap on my job helmet, and squeeze down into a job cannon and fire off into job land, where jobs grow on jobbies!”
-Charlie from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”

I like my chances at finding a job better than for Charlie, my favorite character on Always Sunny. I’m literate, for starters, though sometimes I don’t spell like it. I also don’t habitually huff spray-paint or subsist on cat food while living in squalor (yet).

While Charlie’s only career skills are doing “Charlie Work” like scrubbing urinals and killing rats, I’m pretty proud of my academic work and experience. I won’t be doing “Charlie Work” if I can help it, but I’ve been thinking about the things I would do. My conclusions and subsequent career directions have changed quite a bit in the last year.

For instance, I had a pretty exciting interview this morning for a position I probably would’ve scoffed at back when I thought only in terms of “good guys” (newspaper journalists) and “bad guys” (nearly everybody else, except for kittens and orphans).

READ ON…

In undergrad, I spent a lot of time mocking the broadcast students as they lugged their heavy tripods out of Martin Hall and scribbling inverted-pyramid stories about the campus police for The Daily Athenaeum.

A few years later, I’ve shot video packages and enjoyed it. I’ve followed the Federal funds rate and understood why it mattered. I’ve tried to dig into social media and even written a tutorial for SQL of my own free will.

Most significantly, I’ve embraced the idea that I’ll probably never work for a newspaper again. And I think I’m OK with that.

Things seem a little brighter when you accept that your life might not turn out exactly the way you’ve always planned. Or when you realize that there may be opportunities in things you always thought of as Charlie Work.

Or that’s how it seems to this Master of Science. And Karate. (You knew it was coming.) And Friendship for Everyone.

Doest the lady require a list of my references? (Source: The Yorck Project)

I was confused at first because I thought the call was from my dentist’s office. Then I was excited. And then… the crushing dread.

Getting this far always leaves me in a worse mental spot than just having my resume ignored or rejected outright.

It feels so much more personal. My skills looked good on paper, but we met and we talked and they just weren’t all that into me.

It reminds me of a few separate conversations I’ve had since graduation about how the job search is like the dating scene.

You feel each other out, you flirt with thank you cards and follow-up phone calls, you try to strike a balance between coy and over-enthusiastic.

(Though I’ve never actually kept a spreadsheet of my romantic failures…)

Sure, the analogy works. But it’s a little too obvious, even for a bunch of twenty-something ladies who count boys and careers among their frequent anxieties.

Dating and interviewing are more like life itself than they are like each other. They’re just more evident, more painful, more rewarding examples of what happens when you take risks.

I think that most everything you do nudges the wheel one way or the other– how hard you decided to work today, the kind of sandwich you ate for lunch. They’re not big moves, but they either keep you on course or start you on another one, whether you realize it or not.

It’s just that career changes and relationships are the big intersections. They require us to venture something, to move decisively, all with the understanding that we might get off track and wind up in a ditch somewhere.

What could be more intimidating than knowing you could screw it all up for yourself? What could be more exciting than getting to start something new and wonderful?

But there are some lessons for the job search that I could learn from dating. Like how I decided one morning in college, after a particularly disastrous liaison, that I wasn’t going to let boys hurt my feelings anymore. It’s been mostly successful.

I think I’m going to try not letting jobs hurt my feelings. That doesn’t mean I’m going to slum it with the first job that whistles at me out a car window…

It just means being willing to take the risk because nothing can possibly ever work out until something does.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/78812597@N00/ / CC BY 2.0

The whole world is moving and I’m standing still. –The Weepies

The great workforce beast lurched forward and out into the snow this morning, as evidenced by all the grumbling on Facebook and Twitter. They stood at bus stops and waited in traffic and swiped metro cards on the way to that glorious first pot from some office’s dormant Mr. Coffee.

My college friends bought text books and made arrangements to meet for lunch. My teacher friends worked on lesson plans. My office-bound friends searched their wallets for misplaced keycards and garage passes. Everyone complained about the cold.

It’s hard to get going again, even with these brand new socks, it’s cold, it’s hard, it’s early, they tweeted. But there’s also some comfort in the heavy thud of routine.

I remember the unspoken pleasures in coming back– the pleasantries with friends and office-mates, the stuffy hiss of the startled HVAC system, the sorting of endless e-mail that has stacked up in the interval.

I got up when my host left for work this morning and that Weepies lyric came to mind as I watched from under a blanket on the couch as he donned a heavy coat and hat for the morning commute. (I’ll spare you the song itself, as it’s sort of revoltingly sentimental.)

It’s strange to be left behind as the world waltzes toward Monday afternoon, while I sit in my friend’s silent apartment with a Diet Coke and a sugar cookie, watching the snow fall into the parking lot of the hair salon downstairs.

It’s not boredom or discomfort. I have a phone interview for a job in a few hours and a few resumes to send out today. I’m mostly hopeful and content on this still little island, but I also feel a little left out of the Monday misery blitz.

I’m here too, I want to say. I’m here, don’t worry, I’ll catch up with you soon.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajawin/ / CC BY 2.0

They continued on the road to Puerto Lápice, and about three in the afternoon it came into view.

“Here,” said Don Quixote when he saw it, “we can, brother Sancho Panza, plunge our hands all the way up to the elbows into this thing they call adventures.”

-”Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes

A friend loaned me a pile of books to read over the Christmas holiday, a few weeks ago. At the last minute, he threw Cervantes on top and I started fumbling for an excuse not to take it.

I’m as game for tales of knights-errant as the next gal, but the 940-page epic seemed too big of a commitment for the holidays. Plus, I started reading it years ago and couldn’t really connect.

“This is a great translation,” my friend insisted. “You’ll think it’s really funny, I promise.”

As he predicted, I’ve been delightedly consuming it and inflicting the best passages on whichever family member happens to be sitting closest. But the one above resonated in particular.

Don Quixote is a bit of a kindred spirit, save for the unreasonable delusions and deteriorating mental state. I like how he strikes out with no real plan except to react bravely and valliantly to the circumstances he meets along the road. My way, too,  has always been to just sally forth in search of what I want, taking the adventures and windmills as they come. Somehow it’s always works out– in one magically unexpected way or another.

My job search is no ripe peach. It’s been disheartening and frustrating and seemingly endless. I can’t imagine a worse drain on one’s self esteem than to face rejection and silence over and over for things you barely want– unpaid internships, minimum-wage jobs in expensive cities.

But there’s another, more buoyant side to all of that. I can’t even guess what’s next for me and it’s an exhilarating reminder that my life could change at any moment. With just one right phone call, e-mail, interview. I’ve had at least one preliminary interview for a job I would love to have.

To steal a note from one of the best scenes from arguably the best music journalism film of our time:

“It’s all happening.”

And I’m digging in up to my elbows.